One Question

Thank God for professor types who are happy to take a grant and go spend a few years working out such vital questions!

Imagine trying to write down all you know. Me thinks that’s what a lot of monks used to do, but missed the opportunity to learn a whole lot more because there they were with their heads down instead of being out gaining new experiences.

And how would you go about the task of writing all the words you know. Alphabet perhaps?

What begins with A? Apple, About, Another… it’d get a tad boring pretty quickly.

English is one of the most rich and varied languages where prose itself becomes a joy once you give up your preconceptions and let the words flow over you – though try not to picture Stephen Fry, you may feel squashed by the experience.

With English there tends to be a word for it, whatever IT may be.

With German you get around the issue of a smaller vocabulary by stringing together a whole stream of words that really gives you a sentence describing IT, but by whipping the gaps away you can pretend it’s just one word. But you’re not fooling us!

And French. Oh I love to hear French. I fancy her already even though I’ve only heard her say “hello”.

So how many do we know? Well the English tend to know an average of 43,000 words (think of the monk, you’d be writing a long time), which compares very well with the suave Francais who come in at a piffling 25,000, beaten even by the pizza men, with the Italians notching up 27,000.

How do I know this? Oh, do I really have to tell you? I read it last night in a lovely book on copy writing called, imaginatively, Copywriting.